William Trevor, who died a year and a half ago at the age of 88, achieved a deserved reputation as one of the greatest short-story writers in English; as a novelist, too, he was highly and justly praised. Both forms brought him prizes and awards as well as Irish and British honors. In the end he left more than 30 volumes of work, including the present, the posthumously published “Last Stories.”

Born
William Trevor Cox
in County Cork in 1928, he was one of three children of parents who despised each other, a clenching, deadening state of affairs that surfaced again and again in his fiction. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, after which he put in short stints as a tutor and, later, as a teacher, until the school at which he taught folded. Unable to find another job, he moved with his wife to England, where he taught school again for a couple of years before deciding to become a sculptor, chiefly carving works for churches. It turned out to be a good way not to make a living; it also failed to satisfy his devouring interest in people’s lives. “I sometimes think,” he said, “all the people who were missing in my sculpture gushed out into the stories.”

Photo:
Mark Gerson/National Portrait Gallery, London

Last Stories

By William Trevor

Viking, 213 pages, $26

Still, those great stories lay in the future. In order to support his growing family, he took a job writing advertising copy, at which, he claimed, he was dreadful, a fact recognized by his employers. He quit before he was fired, though not before availing himself of one of the company’s typewriters and making a start at writing fiction. He disowned his first novel, but his second, “The Old Boys” (1964), a splendid black comedy about a group of elderly, rivalrous past schoolmates, won the Hawthornden Prize, and Trevor was launched into his natural calling.

Although he lived in England for over two-thirds of his life and set many of his novels and stories there, Trevor considered himself an Irish writer. He was also a Protestant, “a lace-curtain Protestant,” as he put it, his father having been a middle-class bank manager. Thus his fiction is populated chiefly by small-business owners, shopkeepers, farmers, schoolteachers, office workers and managers, and, often enough, the shabby genteel, the reduced clergy and the unemployed. He had the gift of placing his characters in their milieus and life trajectories with swift introductory sentences, after which he set about complicating their lives with economy and precision, before bringing the entire affair home to an exquisitely unexpected denouement or resting point. The result was, in most cases, perfect, self-contained creations.

The subjects of his novels and stories are—put baldly—guilt, isolation, betrayal, begrudgery, delusion, the tyranny of the needy, the waste of individual lives and that specialty of the Irish, the dead. Be that as it may, an understated wit, unsentimental compassion, and allowance for expiation and grace redeem Trevor’s fiction from utter bleakness and gloom. There is even, at times, a certain mischievous glee detectable in his gravitation toward the gothic, the grotesque and the creepy. A sense of menace and madness pervades any number of his novels and short stories. Of the latter, “Gilbert’s Mother” (Gilbert is a psychopath), “Going Home” (a schoolboy is a sociopath) and “The News From Ireland” (a peasant family has given their infant the stigmata; insurrection threatens) are fine examples. The last named, which is set during the Famine, along with such stories as “Beyond the Pale,” “The Distant Past” and “Lost Ground,” draw a miasma of fear and lurking threat from Ireland’s wretched, divisive history.

The Stories of William Trevor: Three writers of short fiction pick their favorites

Charles Baxter on ’Mrs. Silly’

The subject of William Trevor’s story “Mrs. Silly” (1975) is betrayal of a mother by her son, an 8-year-old embarrassed by her behavior during a visit to his boarding school. She arrives in dowdy clothes; she talks too much and too freely; she slips and falls on the floor during an all-school teatime reception. She knows her own failings: “She wept easily and often said she was silly to weep so.” And yet the boy loves her as intensely as she loves him. Although his father and stepmother are more fun than his mother, “it was his mother he loved.”

Near the end of this confoundingly beautiful story, the boy, Michael, denies to his classmates that the woman who slipped and fell to the floor was actually his mother. “An aunt, he said, some kind of aunt, he wasn’t sure what the relationship was.” In this way, he saves face. But later, at night, in the school dormitory, “he whispered to her in his mind. He said he was sorry, he said he loved her better than anyone.”

The content of this story might veer toward the sentimental if the presentation were less austere and impassive. The coolness of the writing is like the lead container housing a hot nuclear fuel rod. Chekhov once said that a cool style gives a “kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly.” Trevor was our 20th-century Chekhov, and the power of this story is such that, every time I read it, I flinch when the mother falls; I flinch when Michael laughs about her with his friends; and I feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up when, at the end, the boy prays for her forgiveness.

— Mr. Baxter’s latest book of stories is “There’s Something I Want You to Do.” “Mrs. Silly” appears in Trevor’s “Angels at the Ritz” and “Collected Stories.”

Colum McCann on ’Attracta’

William Trevor’s work gives off the deceptive appearance of ease. But Trevor’s project was the unpredictable depths of the human soul in the territory of love, loss and belonging—try making that look easy.

One of my favorites among his stories is “Attracta” (1978), the tale of a reserved, 61-year-old Protestant teacher in a one-room school in rural Cork. Attracta is haunted by a recent newspaper account of the suicide of Penelope Vade, the very young widow of a British soldier ambushed in Belfast. Penelope—who, in what the narrator calls “a gesture of courage and perhaps anger,” had moved to Belfast from small-town Sussex—killed herself after being raped and beaten by the very men who had decapitated her husband (and sent her the head in a box in the mail). Attracta responds so strongly to the story because her own parents were murdered during the 1916 uprising, when she was 3.

If that all sounds vaguely gory and Hollywood, please read it, once, twice, three times, because Trevor’s genius is varied, unshowy and profound. The political horrors of Ireland and Northern Ireland are given tangible human form. Attracta is so overwhelmed by regret that she has spent her whole life in a paralyzing silence.

Now, at the end of her career, she stands in the classroom in front of her young students, wishing to tell them not only Penelope’s story but her own too, and in the process reclaim the dignity of truth telling. “It matters that Penelope Vade died in despair, with no faith left in human life,” she says. It matters that both she and Penelope be remembered, and that the children know that “God does not forever withhold His mercy.”

William Trevor has said that he was driven by a curiosity with the unfamiliar. In the course of his career he became a quiet, familiar voice bravely negotiating the unknown. Somehow, out of the dust of language, we—his readers—were allowed to arrive and find ourselves.

In the first paragraph of “Traditions” (2000), William Trevor introduces us to Olivier and his schoolmates, who before morning chapel straggle into the boarding-school barn. “Each in turn saw the jackdaws dead on the earthen floor: seven, as there were seven of them. . . . The birds’ necks had been snapped, one of the heads twisted off.” The birds had been their pets. Who did this? Leggett? Chapman? Young Olivier, whose studies have lately been disrupted by thoughts about the dining-hall maids, has his suspicions and operates by instinct, and his instincts are excellent. He does not, however, choose to speak. Trevor lets us hear the boys speculate, then moves away, giving the illusion that at any moment he might abandon his main character and dwell elsewhere, though the writer’s movements are a magician’s gestures of distraction: Look away, lest you see the trick! So we, too, must watch and wait. Though the subtle connection between sex and death doesn’t radiate until the final paragraph—the “hot” maid, starching her uniform, avoids pain by licking her finger before touching the iron—in Trevor, danger is everywhere, even when averted. The finger remains unscorched, but the reader burns. In this school that “made men of boys,” we can only shake our heads, or bow them and pray that those victimized (as well as those who are self-justifying abusers) end the tradition of enacting their own silent, private cruelties of exploitation and revenge.

— Ms. Beattie’s latest book of stories is “The Accomplished Guest.” “Traditions” appears in Trevor’s “A Bit on the Side” and “Selected Stories.”

As a Protestant, Trevor grew up as an outsider in a country that fused zealous nationalism with the Catholic faith. His was the religion of the supplanted, which may account, in part, for the melancholic mood of his stories, their overall feeling of loss and resignation. That feeling, however, is one that acknowledges that the arrangements of the past were unjust and well rid of. In Trevor’s later work, this dual sensibility mutates into the perception that Ireland as she was—poor, pinched, penitential, a country “drained of its energy by centuries of disaffection”—is, herself, being supplanted by the “New Ireland.” She is now a nation whose people are better off, possess enlarged opportunity and are no longer held in the Church’s clamp—but they are a people who are, at the same time, barbarized by a belief in the priority of material advance and self-fulfillment.

The central characters of the stories “Justina’s Priest” (2002) and “At Olivehill” (2006) are, in their own ways, shaken and appalled by the country’s reigning air of expediency and disdain for the past. In the first, a priest realizes that an older sister, weary of responsibility, secretly hopes that her mentally handicapped sister will go off to Dublin, even if it is to a life of prostitution. In the other, the widow of a man descended from one of the few Catholic families who managed to keep their estate through centuries of Protestant rule is helpless before her children’s plan to raze the faithfully preserved ancestral homestead to build a profitable golf course. She reflects on how her husband’s faith and her own “connected them with the nation that had newly come about. But faith’s variations mattered less in Ireland all these years later, since faith itself mattered less and influenced less how people lived.”

The 10 stories that make up the new and presumably final collection hit the familiar themes and possess an even grimmer sense of a postlapsarian world. Never guilty of unrelieved kindness toward his characters, Trevor seems overtly punitive in some of these stories. In “Mrs. Crasthorpe,” the vulgar, vain woman of that name, recently widowed, is glad her husband is dead: “I shall relish my widowhood,” she says to herself. “I shall make something of it.” But not only does this unlikable female spin a fantasy around a man who wants nothing to do with her, she also has a secret that eventually destroys her in an improbable fashion.

The stories here are more spare than previous works—a few could be called etiolated—moving without Trevor’s usual color, detail or dialogue toward what we may call their message. “The Piano Teacher’s Pupil” is a case in point. Trevor quickly outlines the life story of Miss Nightingale, a sacrifice to the well-being of two men—her late father and a married man whom she finally realized would never leave his wife. But she is content enough with the inherited house and an income from teaching piano to untalented pupils. Then a young prodigy appears, his genius unmistakable and a joy, but at each visit he steals little things from her house. It is the worm in the apple, but she tolerates it though it makes her wonder if she has been a dupe all her life. Out of that eventually comes an acceptance of the mystery that is, essentially, that good—in this case, art—and evil are connected in the world.

That mystery, rather too peremptorily stated in this story, is familiar in Trevor’s work, much of which could be read as problems in theodicy. It underlies “Giotto’s Angels” and “The Crippled Man.” The first concerns an amnesiac picture restorer whose savings are stolen by a prostitute. The other, called “The Woman of the House” when it was first published in the New Yorker in 2008, is about a woman who covers up the death of the crippled man she has cared for so she can continue to collect his pension on which she relies for her livelihood. It is a deeper and more satisfactory story than a number of the others, as it includes a nimble, nicely textured back story as well as the perspective of two Eastern European immigrant workmen who figure out what the situation is, but who, in their own iffy legal standing, say nothing.

That story stands with two others as being up to Trevor’s own mark. One, “An Idyll in Winter,” is about a sun-dappled summer in which 12-year-old
Mary Bella
and her 22-year-old tutor, Anthony, find joyful companionship and a communality of spirit. That enchanted summer over, Anthony moves on and marries happily until, alas, many years later, he visits Mary Bella and an affair begins. I will not tell the rest except to say that this is William Trevor doing what he does best: making people face up to what they’ve done with their lives. The book’s finest, most disturbing story is “The Women,” which distills a number of the writer’s enduring themes: forms of betrayal, the oppressive neediness of the weak and inconvenient, and the unreliability of appearances—that reality is “surreptitious,” as a character in the earlier story “After Rain” puts it. By the end of “The Women,” its opening line, which is all I shall give you, has achieved a brilliance of irony: “
Cecelia Normanton
knew her father well, her mother not at all.”

I hope that someday a great compendium of William Trevor’s stories will appear and that, when it does, there will still be readers who can appreciate their spareness and humor, the vast reach of their creator’s imagination into the lives of others, the finesse with which he shocks us, and his appreciation of our temporal lot, where nothing really works out except endurance and resignation.

—Ms. Powers, a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s
Nona Balakian
Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, is the editor of “Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of
J.F. Powers,
1942-1963.”